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| THE PLAY'S THE THING | |
 March 10, 1999 
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Tom Stoppard, co-writer of the film, "Shakespeare In Love," was in San Francisco for the American premier of his play "Indian Ink." After this background report, he discusses the state of modern theater with Elizabeth Farnsworth.
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NIRAD DAS: You wish me to be less Indian? FLORA CREWE: Well, I did say that, but I think what I meant was for you to be more Indian, or at any rate Indian, not Englished-up, and all over me like a Labrador and knocking things off tables with your tail.
ACTOR: This, the global day. ACTOR: The general global day. Okay. SPENCER MICHELS: Stoppard's dialogue is witty and provocative, the complex ideas not always easy to absorb on first hearing. That presents a challenge for Actor Art Malik and Director Carey Perloff.
SPENCER MICHELS: Malik says for an actor, a Stoppard script can be difficult, yet fulfilling.
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| Crafting the dialogue of "Shakespeare in Love." | ||||||||
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JOSEPH FIENNES: I am. GWYNETH PALTROW: Then kiss me again, for I am not mistook. SPENCER MICHELS: In "Shakespeare in Love," Stoppard supplied the sparkling dialogue that punctuated the highly charged romance between the struggling playwright, Will Shakespeare, and a high-born would-be actress. But even amid the froth and passion of the love story, Stoppard shows his fascination with ideas. Judi Dench, playing Queen Elizabeth, mouths Stoppard's own curiosity over whether drama can accurately portray love.
JUDI DENCH: I thought you were here because you had none. (Laughter) Well, no one will take your wager, it seems. JOSEPH FIENNES: 50 pounds. JUDI DENCH: A very worthy sum for a very worthy question. Can a play show us the very truth and nature of love?
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| Plays about ideas. | ||||||||
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SPENCER MICHELS: Mathematicians at a Berkeley research institute were so impressed that they invited Stoppard to the campus for a chat.
SPENCER MICHELS: Stoppard doesn't pretend to be an expert, just a well- informed, curious playwright. As such, he insists on getting involved in minute details about the production and script of "Indian Ink." CAREY PERLOFF: Then we keep this, yeah? "Are you not feeling well?" TOM STOPPARD: We keep that. And the "damn" is new, but it's useful, is it?
TOM STOPPARD: Yeah, okay. SPENCER MICHELS: As a dramatic craftsman, Stoppard is in the public eye this year more than ever, as "Indian Ink" plays in San Francisco; his latest play, "The Invention of Love," runs in London; and "Shakespeare in Love" fills movie houses. |
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SPENCER
MICHELS: 61-year-old Tom Stoppard is in the limelight this season as
co-writer of the film "Shakespeare in Love," which has earned him an
Academy Award nomination. He came to San Francisco last month to work
with the director on the American premiere of his play "Indian Ink."
The work is set in India, where the Czech-born Stoppard spent part of
his childhood. "Indian Ink," on stage at the American Conservatory Theater,
takes place mostly during the Raj, the time of British rule. Like many
Stoppard plays, this one probes multiple themes: Love and art, history
and culture, and the Raj itself. 
FLORA
CREWE: You're still doing it, Mr. Das. 
SPENCER
MICHELS: The character, Nirad Das, is an Indian painter, much taken
with Flora Crewe, a bohemian British poet visiting India in 1930 for
her health. 
CAREY
PERLOFF, American Conservatory Theater: His plays are always a tapestry
of many, many different threads, and what's breathtaking about them
is that the threads actually coalesce. They're quite remarkably complicated
and quite remarkably hilarious. And I don't really think there is anybody
quite like him. I think certainly Harold Pinter is as great a playwright,
but a totally different playwright. 
ART
MALIK, Actor: With Tom, you do look at it, and you think, "Well, maybe
I'm not intelligent enough to understand what this line means when it
says, 'the character says yes.' Maybe he's actually meaning maybe, or
is it no, or is it a yes, yes, or is it a yes, yes, yes? You know, we
don't know. So as an actor, you start investing more into it. And that's
part of the joy of it all, that you do invest more and more of your
time on a Stoppard play. 
GWYNETH
PALTROW: Are you the author of the plays of William Shakespeare?
COLIN
FIRTH: Nature and truth are the very enemies of playacting. I'll wager
my fortune. 
SPENCER
MICHELS: For Stoppard, questions like that may be more important than
the answers. For over 30 years, Stoppard, through his characters, has
wrestled intellectually with a long list of big issues, and especially
with language itself. In "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," based
on two minor characters from "Hamlet," Guildenstern proclaims, "Words,
words. They're all we have to go on." And in the hit play "Arcadia,"
Stoppard delves into questions of horticulture, academics, love, and,
surprisingly, chaos theory in mathematics. 
THOMASINA:
Each week, I plot your equations dot for dot, X's against Y's and all
manner of Algebraical relations, and every week, they draw themselves
as commonplace Geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs
and angles. God's truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve
like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell. 
TOM
STOPPARD, Playwright: There's a suggestion that numbers have a kind
of social behavior, that they're not simply tools of description. 
CAREY
PERLOFF: Yes.